These Are the 2018 Nominees for the Only U.S. Awards Recognizing Latin American Cinema

As part of its mission to promote and champion Latin American and U.S. Latino Cinema for nearly two decades, Cinema Tropical, one of international cinema’s biggest allies stateside, hosts the Cinema Tropical Awards very year in NYC, in addition to its year-round involvement in helping with distribution, PR services, and overall support for great films.

For their eighth edition, the Cinema Tropical Awards have changed their nomination process in an effort to reflect the shifting and non-binary way in which movies are being made today across both fiction and documentary narratives. Rather than nominate a handful of works in separate categories that denote the distinction between the two, Cinema Tropical chose to shortlist 25 distinct Latin American films, all of which will compete for awards in the categories of Best Film, Best Director, and Best First Film where it applies.

Carolina Bilbao, Vice President of Programming and Development for Cinelatino; Remezcla’s own film editor, Vanessa Erazo; and film critic Claudia Puig, president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, comprise the U.S. Latino Film jury.

Standouts among the Latin American contenders include Chile’s Oscar hopeful A Fantastic Woman, about a transgender woman fighting for her right to mourn a loved one; Mexican documentary Devil’s Freedom, which explores the horrors of the drug war through first-hand accounts; Brazil’s Aquarius, centered on an older woman pushing back against the system that’s trying to evict her from her home; Amat Escalante’s The Untamed, a sci-fi drama that blends art house sensibilities with extraterrestrial monsters; and Argentina’s Kékszakállú, an unconventional vision of teenage femininity inspired by a Hungarian opera. In total 10 countries are represented in the shortlist: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay and Venezuela.

The winners will be announced at a special ceremony at The New York Times headquarters in New York City on January 10, 2018. In addition, the winning films will be showcased as part of the Cinema Tropical Festival, which will takes place February 2-4, 2018 at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.

In case you were wondering why some films you’ve heard of qualified and others didn’t, the selected works premiered between April 1, 2016 and March 31, 2017.

Take a look at the full shortlist of Latin American films below (alphabetically by title)